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Video: Crowd-sourced video could give police 3-D surveillance

This software in the works could potentially help police stitch together mass amounts of video in terrorist-type situations

By Sam Clements
The Motherboard Blog

BOSTON — Imagine if you could stitch together all the video footage from the Boston attack to form a single immersive narrative. CoSync has the ability to link video and audio from a multitude of cell phone cameras to provide a picture that functions, in theory, like 3-dimensional “bullet time,” useful for building an interactive panorama of any public event.

At a large public gathering like the Boston Marathon, there are thousands of eyes: solitary recordings from closed circuit television video, TV broadcasters, and civilian mobile devices that generate reams and reams of footage of potential suspects. After gaining access to that data, it falls to weary investigators to analyze that footage, from all directions at once, in search of a common thread.

As authorities have discovered during more than a decade of urban terrorist attacks, scouring through what is thought to be the thousands of hours of video taken in the minutes surrounding any incident is a logistical nightmare. Due to be released in June as open source software, CoSync will allow other developers to build their own uses on top of CoSync’s networking technology.

Full Story: “Bullet-Time” for Terrorism: Crowdsourced Phone Video Could Give Police 3-D Surveillance